


These Things Will Change

by isthisenoughorcanwegohigher



Category: The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Oops, lowkey song fic, me: you know what this would be good for? newt angst, taylor swift: writes a love song
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-26 17:38:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17146133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isthisenoughorcanwegohigher/pseuds/isthisenoughorcanwegohigher
Summary: The people at WCKD aren't the only ones who are good at putting up walls. Newt's been doing it his whole life. He's never known a different way to live.





	These Things Will Change

**Author's Note:**

> _'Cause these things will change_   
>  _Can you feel it now?_   
>  _These walls that they put up to hold us back will fall down_   
>  _This revolution, the time will come_   
>  _For us to finally win_   
>  _And we’ll sing hallelujah, we'll sing hallelujah_

**I.**

Newt was supposed to be the strong one, the protector. He was Lizzy’s older brother, he was supposed to look after her and whisper small words of comfort in her ear when the Cranks came and pounded on the windows, not the other way around.

It should be the other way around.

But it was the way that it was, and Newt wanted to hate how easily Lizzy could comfort him, yet he could not.

What he did hate was how desperately he needed the comfort. Especially that last night.

When WCKD came for Lizzy in the morning, when they’d shot his parents and all he could see in his panicked vision was his sister being dragged away from him and the deep red color of blood against a background of white, of snow. All he could feel was desperation as he reached for Lizzy, fought and clawed and kicked against the hands dragging him up the stairs, the tears stinging at the corners of his eyes, the bile rising in the back of his throat.

All he knew was that he would do whatever it took now to protect Lizzy. He wouldn’t let WCKD take her away, too. He wouldn’t.

“Everything’s gonna be okay now, kid,” one of the men said, smiling crookedly at Newt.

No, it wasn’t. But Newt knew now that he couldn’t acknowledge that, not to these men, not to anyone ever again. He stared blankly back at the man, and in his head, he screamed and cried until he could no longer think a coherent word.

No one would ever see him cry again.

 

**II.**

They tortured him until he couldn’t speak from lacerations in his throat. Electric shocks jerked his body from the table until he could no longer feel the sparks in his veins, just his body limply being tossed around.

They tried to make him forget.

He vowed to never forget.

They saw a blankness in his eyes, heard him spew back the words they put in his head, recognized the robotic tone of his voice.

They didn’t see how he would lie awake each night, squinting up at the bunk above him where Minho always seemed to sleep soundly, conjuring faces up in the dark. They didn’t hear the silent whispers in that dark, Lizzy, his mother, his father, their dog, Lizzy’s stuffed bear. They didn’t recognize how they might be winning each battle, but he was winning the war.

He was safe behind the walls he’d put up to keep WCKD out, and he’d be damned if they ever got through.

 

**III.**

Meeting Thomas changed things.

Sure, he liked Minho and Alby, and he enjoyed the nights when they all snuck out and really got the chance to explore the compound and be kids, but he was still hiding with them. They knew about Lizzy, but they didn’t know just how much it still hurt him. Talking about Lizzy--Sonya, now--made them uncomfortable.

But Thomas was different. He felt like he could trust Thomas, no matter what. Thomas, he decided, would be the one person he would let in behind his walls.

Sure, Newt knew he wasn’t immune. He knew that WCKD was using him. But that was okay. It was all okay, as long as Lizzy was safe. And now he had Thomas promising to not forget her, either, to help look after her and keep her safe.

Thomas had even been able to sneak Newt in to see Lizzy one last time before the Trials began, something Newt had been longing for since WCKD had taken them here.

He knew Lizzy didn’t know he wasn’t immune. 

When they pulled away from their hug and she told him that WCKD had saved them, that this was better than being stuck outside, he wanted nothing more than to tell her that he would die anyways, that this disease was probably already eating away at his brain, and that soon he’d be no better off than the Cranks that used to pound away at their windows.

But the words stuck somewhere between his teeth, lodged there like a leftover piece of food he couldn’t pick out, and he remembered his promise that nothing would ever hurt Lizzy. Knowing that he was doomed to die at the hands of an unstoppable disease would only hurt her.

And so he swallowed the words back, clenched them tight in his fists, and hugged his sister fiercely one last time.

Thomas wouldn’t let anything bad happen to her.

Except Thomas, it seemed, had known all along that something bad would happen to all of them, because as Newt stood in line with the others, with a doctor informing them that it didn’t matter if they planned to remember and fight back, because they wouldn’t be able to remember, Newt realized that Thomas had lied to him, just like the man all those years ago, just like his parents when they promised they’d always be with him.

Every single person Newt had ever known had lied to him. He wanted to scream at Thomas, demand to know why he would keep this from him. Thomas knew how important remembering was to Newt. He couldn’t forget Lizzy.

The words never came, though. He’d trained himself to hold his tongue too well, built up too many walls, and Thomas just hadn’t managed to get past them enough.

So he went silently to the machines when he was led, and he allowed WCKD to take everything from him, and he never showed a sign of fighting. His eyes were hollow, there was no more light. His face was slack. If they wanted to use him, then they could use him, consequences be damned. He just wanted out of these walls.

He wanted to be free of the walls he’d built in his own mind. If WCKD could take that from him, he’d let them.

He wanted to be free from the underground confines he’d spent most of his life in. Four walls and bunk beds, locked doors and dark corridors. He wanted out.

 

**IV.**

He hated this feeling, this impression that he was trapped. He didn’t remember anything about his actual life, but he remembered this feeling from before, this feeling of suffocation, isolation, the desperate desire to escape.

It was a distant memory, but it was there, like memories of playing in the snow that for reasons he couldn’t explain were tinged with fear and disgust. No one else seemed to remember snow that way.

When he tried to talk to Gally about it, Gally told him he was being stupid.

How could he feel like he was suffocating when they were in the biggest outdoor space that any of them could remember?

It only seemed appropriate when they realized that they were all trapped in the center of an ever-changing maze. At night, he would lie awake and listen to the sounds of the maze moving, and each distant scrape of stone on stone felt like nails scratching down his back. Each clang of the maze falling into place echoed in his ears until he was sure he’d never hear anything else again.

He was trapped in this place, and he was trapped in his mind. No one understood how he was feeling, no one listened. He didn’t know how to fight this feeling, not when there was nowhere to escape to.

He could only think of one solution. He climbed the ivy as high as he could get, until the floor of the maze seemed like a distant memory, until he felt as though he could leap from his spot on the stone wall and fly away.

And fly away he did. As he let go, he felt his heart take flight, soaring higher than he’d ever known, and he was sure that he would know peace. He was so sure. He was finally out.

 

**V.**

Two years had passed since Newt had tried to kill himself. Two years of building his endurance back up, two years of wondering when the cracks had appeared in the walls he’d built in his mind, two years of doing everything in his power to fix himself in every way possible, and almost being able to.

Until the day the new Greenie came. Thomas.

And then everything in Newt’s mind was a mess again, a tangled, dizzy mess that left him feeling as numb as he had when he’d woken up to Minho dragging him out of the maze in a panic, his leg snapped in three different places.

He couldn’t figure out why, but Thomas was familiar. Thomas was someone he could trust. Someone he could keep safe. Someone who would keep him safe.

He didn’t remember ever letting someone in, trusting someone this deeply, but he let Thomas in, even when things went wrong. Even when Ben got stung and attacked Thomas, even when Alby went into the maze for the first time that any of the original Gladers could remember, even when he almost lost the three people he ever remembered caring for to the maze, even when he  _ did  _ lose Alby, he still let Thomas in.

But he still never let down his walls. He needed those walls, because they kept him safe. He was dependent on those walls to survive. It was how, against all odds, he’d gotten this far.

 

**VI.**

They were out. They were finally out. Out of the maze, out of the Glade, out of the compound that turned out to just be WCKD all over again.

They were out, though at the cost of several of their own, and Newt had never wished so hard to be safe behind a set of walls. Sure, they weren’t being chased by WCKD anymore, they weren’t at risk of being harvested for something inside them, but they were still running.

It seemed like they would always be running.

He took comfort in the fact that, at the very least, he was safe inside his own mind, behind his own personal walls. It was a small comfort, but in the wake of Winston’s death and realizing that not all of them were as immune as they thought, it was a comfort he would cling to with everything he had.

So in the near unbearable heat of the sun, dragging aching feet across endless stretches of sand, he retreated into his own head, grateful for whatever he’d known in his forgotten past that was the reason for the isolation in his mind.

 

**VII.**

He hadn’t realized how much Minho really meant to him until the moment that the Berg doors had slid shut and WCKD had flown off to God knows where with Minho unconscious, held up by a couple of men with guns.

Sure, he’d absolutely counted Minho as a friend. A close friend. But it never occurred to him until that moment that Thomas wasn’t the only one who’d slipped past his defenses. Somehow Minho had managed that, too.

He didn’t know when it had happened. Minho had always felt familiar, so maybe it had been before the maze, before WCKD stole his memories. Or maybe it had been when Minho had risked his own life to save Newt from the maze when he’d tried to kill himself.

The only thing Newt was sure of was that it didn’t matter. Minho was a friend, and he’d gotten past Newt’s walls, and now WCKD had him again, and even if it was impossible, Newt would gladly die trying to free Minho. He would give it everything he had, and he knew Thomas would do the same.

They were going to get Minho back. They didn’t have any other choice.

 

**VIII.**

He didn’t understand the despair that lit up Thomas’s face when he revealed to him that he had the Flare.

It wasn’t, per say, that Newt was excited to die. He didn’t even actually want to die, not anymore. That had long since passed. It was just that he’d accepted it a long time ago, and he wasn’t surprised that this was going to be how he went out. Dying slowly, painfully, forgetting everything he’d come to know since he’d been forced to forget the first time.

It was just that, if he was being honest with himself, he’d known from the beginning of this journey to get out of the maze, to get away from WCKD, to get Minho back, that there would be a price to pay. There was always going to have to be a sacrifice, and it only made sense that it was him.

It only made sense that the price was his life, and he was willing to let that be.

The only part about it he wanted to fight was that he was still trapped behind WCKD’s walls. He was always sure about one thing in life, and that was that no matter what, he wouldn’t die stuck in the grasp of WCKD.

He knew without a doubt that WCKD was the reason he’d built up so many of his own walls, and he was okay knowing that he would die having never broken through them, but he wasn’t okay dying in WCKD’s grasp. All he’d ever wanted was to get away from WCKD, and now he was going to die here in this fucking city.

So then again, maybe he did understand the despair that Thomas felt. Maybe he was just kidding himself when he said he was okay with what was happening. God, he just didn’t want to die trapped behind all these walls. He hoped he could fight off the Flare long enough to die outside, to die free.

Dying free sure did sound nice.

 

**IX.**

Thomas had the necklace. That was all that was important to him anymore. Thomas had the necklace. He had the letter. He would know everything that Newt had never been able to say.

If he could, Newt would have laughed. Only now did his own walls limit him from being able to express how he felt.

Actually, he wouldn’t have laughed. He would have cried, if he could, but everything WCKD had done to him had left him with so many walls that he couldn’t even cry. He couldn’t remember the last time that he had cried. Like the truth of who he was at his core, his ability to cry was locked down so deep in his own mind that it was impossible, even now, on the brink of losing himself completely to this virus, on the brink of losing everyone he cared about. He couldn’t cry.

This thought carried him through the streets of the city, leaning heavily on Thomas, until the weight of all of it was too much, and Newt collapsed on the hard concrete.

He lay there, focused on the feeling of wanting so badly to cry and not being able to, that he forgot he was sick, lying on the cold ground, twitching. Didn’t hear Thomas pleading for him to come back from the brink.

There was no more brink to come back from. He couldn’t cry. The virus had taken over his systems, using his fluids for its own use. For spreading, for infecting, for leaking black strings of liquid and tracing the patterns of his veins in dark, twisting spiderwebs of sickness.

Newt was gone. He’d lost to the virus. He couldn’t cry. All he could remember was the itching anger in the back of his mind. The need to scream, to snarl, to fight.

He launched himself at the terrified figure in front of him. Dimly, the face registered as Thomas, and Newt wanted to claw at his own skin until the virus bled out of him, because he never wanted to hurt Thomas. Still, he could not cry. Thomas was crying, underneath him, as Newt’s jaws snapped together in a ferocious growl, and Newt felt a new emotion. Not anger, but jealousy.

He fought himself as he fought Thomas, desperate to regain control. Still, he could not cry. Thomas’s hand was on his shoulder, and the unfamiliar-familiar touch was enough to bring him back.

He held the gun to his head only for Thomas to knock it away. Didn’t Thomas know that he wanted to die while he was still himself? Couldn’t Thomas see that Newt didn’t want to live like this, stuck forever behind walls he could never break through? He was sick, he wasn’t himself, and still, he could not cry.

The fury of Thomas’s ignorance snapped like a rubber band jumping back into place inside of Newt, and he lost himself to the waves of the virus crashing against his walls again, felt himself drowning in it, and distantly he wondered if this was all he was destined to become. A Crank, slowly and painfully drawing breath after rattling breath until the virus ran its course and, exhausted, he dropped to the ground again and died, a shell of who he once had been.

There was a knife in his chest, but the pain of it didn’t register with him. He didn’t feel it. 

What he did feel was his hand and Thomas’s hand slipping from the handle of the knife. What he did feel was the hot confusion that dried up the waves of the virus and cracked the foundation of the walls keeping him stuck in his own mind. Who had driven the knife through the boundaries of flesh and muscle and bone and sinew into his heart?

He didn’t know, and he was sure that Thomas didn’t either.

“Tommy.” The name fell from his lips easier than the black liquid pooling in the corners of his mouth. It was warm and sweet and it didn’t stick. His eyes drifted to Thomas’s eyes, who was watching him in a quiet panic. His hand was back on his shoulder.

There were so many things that Newt wanted to say, so much he wanted to do, but his mouth stopped opening and he collapsed backwards, his last living thought on the necklace he knew Thomas had.

Thomas had the necklace. Newt might not have made it out of the walls he spent his life trapped behind, but the necklace would. His words would be free when he himself could not be. And that was okay. A tear dripped down his cheek.

 

**X.**

There was something about death that was so much more freeing than he’d ever imagined it could be.

He was floating along a warm current, though he couldn’t tell if it was water or air that carried him away from the battered shell his body had become.

The current carried him out of the city, past the walls WCKD built to keep the Cranks out, past the ruins of civilization and barren grasslands, all the way out, out and up, and he was free.

He was free at last, he was free and he was flying, and he wasn’t afraid anymore. There were no more walls to keep him contained.

**Author's Note:**

> _But it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah_


End file.
